XFree86 4.0.1 packages have finally been released, so I can
build packages on my own machine again. This makes me feel
a lot better.

Personal

Went shopping yesterday and picked up new shoes. Rockport,
leather, semi-formal, fairly comfortable. Took me a while
to get my size down. I think my feet have been shrinking on
me, or at least changing shape. I wore size 11 (US) tennis
shoes when I was in high school. At some point, they went
down to 10.5, and then down to 10. Dress shoes have always
been 10. Now I get these, and I do end up getting a 10M,
but I've always liked a little extra room to stretch the
toes, (which would imply a W), but getting a wide version
apparantly slightly increases the length of the shoe,
resulting in slight slippage. So it was a decision between
a shoe that gives me toe splay room but slides a little when
I walk, or a shoe that has my toes pressing slightly against
the side but doesn't have me starting to slip out of it when
I walk. I tried a 9.5W, but that was now too short, and the
back of the shoe would dig into my ankle when I extended the
foot downward.

I think I'm a 9.75W, or something like that. If I ever get
filthy stinking rich, I'll have custom shoes tailored and
find out.

I wish there were a way to quickly search for recent diary
entries containing specific keywords. I can't keep up with
reading everything that shows up.

Debian-related

licq -
Yes, the QT plugin crashes for some people. Unfortunately,
nobody can tell me exactly what configuration makes it
unstable. I still think it's a QT2.2 bug. The problem is,
of course, that it's impractical to try to reach everyone
who submitted a crash report every time the QT libraries
change. Worse, because it might be an interaction between
specific versions of QT and specific versions of libc...
And I can't get it to regularly crash on my own machine.

iraf -
Has anyone ever actually gotten all of the IRAF binaries to
compile (and work) dynamically linked? Just to get it as
far as I have I've had to convert all of the relevant build
scripts into Makefiles so I could clean them up. Not to
mention the bajillion warnings that scroll by...

Spam-related

I had my first success in educating someone about
unsolicited mailings, today. The miscreant in this case was
gamers.com, which took
the list of everyone that had ever registered on their site
(and it's vaguely plausible that I might have done that
once, a very long time ago) and used that as their initial
subscription list when they decided to start a weekly
newsletter including the standard advertisements -- without,
of course, asking those people whether or not they wanted to
be receiving a weekly newsletter. To their credit, they did
have a very clean opt-out system in use, but I was still
annoyed enough to send them (polite, if firm) mail about it
and start documenting an intent to nominate for RBL.
Although my first e-mail got me only a form letter and a
personal unsubscription from all of their lists, the second
one got me a phone number of the fellow apparantly in charge
of coordinating the newsletters and such. We had a rather
productive talk where I trotted out the standard reasonings,
differences between opt-out, opt-in, and
verified/double-opt-in, possible solutions, and of course useful links to
descriptions of how to Do It Right(tm). It ended with a
sense of understanding of the positions on both sides, and a
promise to make sure that things improve. So my sense of
general hostility towards the universe has decreased
slightly today.

Personal

I've run out of bookshelf space to keep all of my books.
I'm now down to double-stacking several shelves.
Unfortunately, I'm also out of wall space to add more
bookshelves.

The local university (LSU) might be about to offer me a
sysadmin-type job, which would be good, since it would end a
long stretch of unemployment. Pays less than I made at my
last full-time job, but since that was in California and I'm
now in Louisiana, there was no way to get around that. It
would also put me back into regular contact with fairly
well-educated people, which also stands a good chance of
improving my mood.

Several people have diary entries complaining about Autumn
depression. While I'm certainly depressed a lot, Autumn
actually has a cheering effect on me. It's only about this
time of year that the temperature and humidity down here
get into the pleasant range. Unfortunately, I
can't really come up with anywhere I'd want to go in this
area to take advantage of it.

For those people wondering what the problem is with LICQ,
apparantly compiling with -fno-rtti causes it to segfault
whenever it accesses code in a plugin that requires it (such
as the QT plugin when it's linked against libqt2.2).
Upstream is aware (and it was fixed in CVS), but I haven't
been able to get it working on 0.85. I am considering
simply packaging a CVS snapshot; I'm just not sure how to
handle a version number for it yet.

The question of enabling SSL support will wait until I've
gotten my subscription to debian-legal sorted out so I can
ask questions about whether or not I need to give the
package up for adoption by someone in the free world.

Oh, on the off chance that you come across this, sorry to
hear about Netizen, Skud. We've only encountered each other
in passing, but I hope you folks all find another happy home
to hack in.

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